2023
-
Open Source, Quants and Publication
I recently got a call from an old friend that I used to work with. He is a lawyer and had recently accepted a job as COO with a high profile quantitative hedge fund. He called me because he wanted to…
-
Unexpected Paths
Those of you who know me well have heard the story about how Columbia University lured me away from the green mountains of North Carolina where I had already accepted a prestigious Ph.D. fellowship…
-
Going Back in Time
I had a conversation a few days ago with a friend works for a financial data company that is trying to reinvent itself as a technology start-up. We laughed at how large firms do not understand that…
-
The Highbridge and Athena Options
J.P. Morgan has spent billions of dollars in an effort to transform its computerized systems, most recently via Athena, 35 million lines of Python code. Before this disappointing effort that came…
-
The Importance of the Right Partners
Over my time at the University of Utah, I look back and understand that we never could have helped $400 billion in pension funds to reimagine how they do what they do without many helping hands along…
-
Julia and Modeling the World
Last week I said I would discuss the language and my thoughts on Julia for the ULISSES Project. Related to this, I would like to explain why our new company will be using Julia for certain projects…
-
Building Bridges, Not Walls
I’ve always been a big believer that it is only through excavating to the lowest levels, that we can build a foundation for the highest buildings or strongest bridges. That is exactly what we are…
-
The Two James’s and the Fork in the Road
Last month I recounted how John Regino had assumed the day to day leadership of the ULISSES Project and he had then asked me to stay on as a Advisory Board member. I agreed and then he asked me to…
-
The Covid Pivot, Bill Walsh and the Super Bowl
It has been over a year since I wrote a blog entry. Now that I’m starting to speak more freely about what I’m doing, John Regino wants me to continue to post on the ULISSES Project website in a…
2021
-
Intermezzo: Intelligence Work
I’ve had some interesting conversations lately, one, in particular, was with the man who rewrote the Pentagon’s hardware and software acquisition guidelines. After his time in the US Airforce, he…
-
Defense Against the DARQ Arts, Optimization: Part 3- My Optimization Odyssey and entering Industry
In grad school, I was running my own server room at my co-op thanks to a NeXT/Apple-related consulting project, and in addition to the money that the contract brought, it also generated additional…
-
Defense Against the DARQ Arts, Optimization: Part 3- My Optimization Odyssey, Columbia and MINOS
Despite the fact that I turned down Columbia three times and Umberto Eco jumped ship, I felt safe in New York City (thanks Angus Young) and enjoyed myself almost immediately. As far as what I…
-
Defense Against the DARQ Arts, Optimization: Part 3 – My Optimization Odyssey, the Mormon Trail
My Optimization Odyssey continued in Utah, but not without a temptation to go back to Cali. In many ways, I was doing a reverse trek. You see, Wallace Stegner, the legendary founder of the creative…
-
Defense Against the DARQ Arts, Optimization: Part 3 – My Optimization Odyssey, the Oregon Trail
Now, that we’ve had a little introduction to linear programming, I think the most useful thing to do before proceeding into more complex areas is to give you a walk-through of my own experiences with…
-
Defense Against the DARQ Arts, Optimization: Part 2
Among my friends and associates, we have a varied group of heroes we follow, so much so that confusion sometimes occurs. For example, a while back I mentioned to my colleague Hal Tolley, “I…
-
Defense Against the DARQ Arts, Optimization: Part 1
While I’m more of an Inkings guy (like the Dean of Oxford Business School, Peter Tufano), but in homage to BYU’s Dean Brigette Madrian and herHarry Potter obsession, I’m going to start a series of…
-
Dan Bricklin is a Loser and Other Things Bankers Say
Some months ago, I had an investment banker tell me that “Dan Bricklin is a loser!” He told me that he had met Bricklin at a Vermont ski resort and that Bricklin was a loser because, while he was…
2020
-
The Second Renaissance, Part 2
Now that the US election season is behind us, I wanted to continue my thoughts on the Second Renaissance.
-
The Second Renaissance, Part 1
In the 1450s, the world was introduced to one of the greatest innovations in history, the metal moveable-type printing press. Johannes Guttenberg and his invention did more to democratize information…
-
The Past as Preview, Part 3: The Mountain Range as the New Frontier
There are problems with the current financial system. There are few places where this is more clearly demonstrated than in the state of underfunding of the world’s pension funds.
-
The Past as Preview, Part 2: The Tower of Babel, and the Rise of Python
I usually do a blog entry a week, but considering that I took a three-month hiatus, I have a massive backlog of information and ideas to convey, so I will likely be doing blog entries for the…
-
The Past as Preview, Part 1: Foundations of Sand and The Future Decline of AWS
It’s been three months since my last entry, something that I did not expect. In the next entry, I will update you on some of the exciting recent changes and why it took me three months to complete an…
-
In Search of the Perfect Language Redux, Part 3: Modern Languages and Languages of Creativity
Last week I continued a discussion about my teacher, Joachim, and what he had taught me about languages as tools. He had a unique perspective on this as a former rabbi and professor of ancient…
-
In Search of the Perfect Language Redux, Part 2: Modern Languages and Languages of Structure
Last week I discussed my great teacher Joachim, the greatest linguist and semiotician I have ever met. While I turned down Joachim’s offer to work for him and “join the family,” it was his teachings…
-
In Search of the Perfect Language Redux, Part 1: Language as a Tool and Structure
In my life, I have been fortunate to have some very special mentors. Among those great teachers, none were greater than Fausto and Joachim, my great Italian teachers. While Fausto was a father to me…
-
Dreaming is Nursed in DARQness, Part 3: In Search of the Master Algorithm
In my last entry, I wrote about Machine Learning, the A in DARQ and I’d like to continue on this topic a bit more. My old friend from high school Kelly White also said he didn’t like the term…
-
Dreaming is Nursed in DARQness, Part 2: The Future of AI
The Economist’s Technology Quarterly this last week was entitled “Artificial Intelligence and It’s Limits.” It’s worth a read or two. While it is meant to address the limits of AI in general, much of…
-
Intermezzo – Thoughts on Current Situations
I’m going to take a break from writing on the DARQ Arts to give some thoughts on current events here in Utah and around the nation. Last Monday, after a full day’s work, I sat down to dinner and…
-
Dreaming is Nursed in DARQness, Part 1: The Future of Blockchain
Question: What do Jane Fonda’s activist lawyer, a celebrated science teacher and former nun, and a future music mogul have in common? Answer: They were not the characters in an Afterschool Special…
-
Into the DARQNess, An Introduction
I believe that the future doesn’t lie in some great beyond, but it is in the great now with mankind utilizing technology correctly just like heroes in the movies. But the technology that will allow…
-
The (Coming) Diamond Age, Part 2 – Hello DARQness, My Old Friend
Some of the things that I view as most beautiful in life are the little things by which so many big things hinge. These are things that some see as “destiny or design,” which can sometimes help nudge…
-
The (Coming) Diamond Age, Part 1 – What will happen with AI and Augmenting Human Intelligence
The Diamond Age is arguably Neal Stephenson’s greatest work. I don’t say this because of its length (Cryptonomicon), epic scope (The Baroque Cycle), or ambitious delivery mechanism (Mongolaid)…
-
The (Coming) Golden Age, Part 3 – Hennessy, Patterson, and Google’s TPU
As it turns out, right around the time we were talking to the people from Dell in Palo Alto, Google was tackling the same problem, just not with finance but instead for search. Google had looked at…
-
The (Coming) Golden Age, Part 2 – An Integrated Architecture for Finance
Once back in Utah, the promised servers from Dell arrived literally within days and that created other problems. As it turned out, Dell had sent me the exact same servers that it was providing to…
-
The (Coming) Golden Age, Part 1 – The Limits of Dennard Scaling and Amdahl’s Law
There has been a lot of hand wringing in the tech industry since the 2019’s CES when Jensen Huang, the CEO and co-founder of Nvidia, announced that “Moore’s Law isn’t possible anymore.” Of course…
-
The Silver Age, Part 3 – Columbia, Value Investing, and Computer Science
As it turns out, the whole investment problem basically turns on valuation. Imagine that, in order to invest we need to figure out value? Again, just like with Cowles and Colorado, the Great…
-
The Silver Age, Part 2 – Berkeley, Churchman’s men, and Bionic Betas
So it’s April Fool’s day, so I’d like to start this entry with a question, “What do a peace-loving philosopher, a Nazi-trained engineer, and a Buddhist Monk have in common?” The answer is that they…
-
The Silver Age, Part 1 – Cowles, Colorado and the Mining for Alpha
It makes sense starting the discussion of the Silver Age with a few words about Colorado, where it all began. No, I don’t mean the Comstock Lode of Louis L’Amournovels my dad used to read, but rather…
-
COVID-19, Legacy, and the Epic of the ULISSES Project
At mid-February of this year, I had a meeting with a couple of prominent researchers that I know at Intermountain Healthcare‘s Medical Center in Murray, Utah. For those of you who are not familiar…
-
Artificial and Augmented Intelligence, Part 3 – Homer, HELP, and the Iliad System
An early result demonstrating the importance of a proper process of integrating human and machine intelligence was presented to the world by one of my all-time heroes, Homer Warner, who I first heard…
-
Artificial and Augmented Intelligence, Part 2 – Chess from Pacioli to Kasparov and the Lesson Learned
For hundreds of years, Chess has been the standard that man used to judge himself and machines. The greatest (and first) math professor in Europe, over five hundred years ago, wrote a book with his…
-
Artificial and Augmented Intelligence, Part 1 – Chessmaster 2000 and the Defeat of (my) Big Brother
I’m writing this on the plane back to Salt Lake from New York and based upon some conversations that I had, I thought an entry on artificial and augmented intelligence was merited. In the last few…
-
In Search of the Perfect Language, Part 3 – Argento, The NeXTSTEP for SLANG
It’s been one heck of a week, so I apologize for the delay in making my entry this week. I haven’t had a 72-hours so packed full since my first 72 in Central Juvenile Hall when I was a kid. For those…
-
In Search of the Perfect Language, Part 2 – FinTech’s Bizarre Bazaar
So now back, to our version of “In Search of…” with your host, the guy who planned on studying with Umberto Eco and got Fisher Black’s files instead. On that last comment, I would have much preferred…
-
In Search of the Perfect Language, Part 1 – Umberto Eco and Fisher Black
The entry today is done in homage to the great scholar Umberto Eco and his masterful work The Search for the Perfect Language in the Making of Europe Series (I actually have a signed copy in my…
-
The First Data Wars
I had an interesting conversation today with the head of the C. Kem Gardner Institute, which is a group here in Utah that has some of the best state macroeconomic statistics of any state in the…
-
Hedge Fund Investment Platforms
Just the other day, a friend of mine called and asked me what I thought about a “new investment platform” being hucked by yet another quant hedge fund. Without discussing what the big name was behind…
-
The Need for Guiding Myths
Anyone who knows me well knows that I love Tron. It was one of the first big CG movies and it inspired an entire generation. More than one of my students has studied the intricacies of Encom…
-
Gaming and the Future of ULISSES
A few of my ULISSES Projectcolleagues and I will be meeting with the new head of the Games Program at the University of Utah in a couple of weeks. As someone who grew up with the Gaming Industry, I’m…
-
The ULISSES Project Blog Begins!
As a matter of course, I have historically existed in a place near Tom Hanks on Castaway on the spectrum of social media postings. An occasional message in a bottle, and that’s it. I have never been…